How do brains enable organisms to learn from observing and interacting with the world? How do their architectural constraints shape this learning and the structure of emergent neural representations? What can we learn from the data we collect in cognitive science and neuroscience? How can artificial intelligence inform our understanding of biological intelligence, and vice-versa?

These are some of the questions I am working on as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Vision Sciences Lab, housed within the Psychology Department and Kempner Institute for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. I am advised by Professors Talia Konkle and George Alvarez, and collaborate with Hanspeter Pfister and others in the Visual Computing Group, in work aiming to make computational models that learn to see more like humans. Generally, I pull heavily from the tools and knowledge of modern AI to make theoretical advances in neuroscience and cognitive science.

I received my Ph.D in Neural Computation from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2023, where I was advised by David Plaut and Marlene Behrmann. My Ph.D work involved the development of computational models of familiar and unfamiliar face recognition, and of cortical organization for visual domains. The latter work introduced a class of computational models of visual cortical topography, referred to as Interactive Topographic Networks. The code to simulate these models and further develop them is publicly available on GitHub, along with the code for my other published projects. Much of my research continues to build upon these topographic models, for example extending it to account for the influence of retinotopy and language on the global organization of human ventral temporal cortex, including mediolateral and hemispheric organization, and in modeling the organization of language through topographic Transformer language models. I see this work as a set of critical first steps towards the development of large-scale functional models of the human brain, a challenging task which will unfold over the next few decades.

Some pretty but uninformative pictures of me